Renovation :: Basement Bathroom and Hallway

May 25 2018,

Ahhh. Another section of the house done.

Slowly but surely we are renovating the home. We have been in the house for approximately 7.5 years. And things are coming along.

With this renovation, we finally did the basement bathroom and hallway.

Let me take you on a tour. Here is what it was when we bought the house.

And after.

I used elements similar to the guest bathroom. In this bathroom, I used bigger subway tiles and the finish was matte. I used the same tile for the floor. The glass tile behind the sink was slightly smaller, but in the same color. The room was painted white. It's simple and functional and gives a clean feeling.

We also recently got the basement hallway done. Yesterday we hung our art on the wall. We still have to do a few painting touch up, change an outlet to a prettier outlet, change one door, make doors for the water heater cabinet and put in hand rails. But the bulk of the work is done. Phew.

These are pictures of the area before we moved in. The last owner had two sets of washer and dryer. One here and one upstairs in a closet. They took the better of the two when they moved, so would I. So they took the one here. I love where the current washer and dryer is, because it is next to the bedrooms. No hauling of things up and down, up and down.

Below are pictures during the renovation.

This green wall below on the left side was slightly bubbled. Hubby took it all the way down to the studs and fixed it so that it did not look funny. 

After renovation. We had original painted the whole area with Sherwin Williams SW6240 Windy Blue. After we painted it, we realized it was way too dark. So we repainted it the next day and chose Sherwin Williams SW7551 Greek Villa. We have Greek Villa in a bunch of other rooms, and I love the white.

Below is the repainting with Greek Villa.

This is a metal wall art that I found at an estate sale a few years ago. It was at a Boston architect's home. This is a landscape of Boston. It has the prudential, the Boston garden, the state house, the north church and other places of interest to Boston. For $39.00, it was a steal.

Below is a tjap from Indonesian that my folks hauled all the way from Jakarta for me. Below is "Hoot Hoot".

There are three other tjaps in the room.

So there, two rooms done. We still have the master bedroom and bathroom to do. I don't know when the plan is, but nothing has been said. Hopefully not soon. We also have to paint one side of the house this summer. Easy peasy, just have to find a few good days to work on it.

Happy Dance!

Quilt & Bitch

Renovation :: Bedroom Hallway

November 19 2017,

"Let's work on the area in front of the guest bathroom" my husband said on Monday afternoon.

"Sure".

A little bit of mudding, patching, painting, cutting trim, painting. It's easy peasy.

Turns out that instead of doing this one wall, we ended up doing the whole hallway.

This was the one wall we planned on working on.

When we hired contractor 7 years ago, they f***ed everything up. We had asked the contractor to take out a small piece of carpeting underneath the door trim. Big mistake. They teared everything down and when they put back the stuff up - it was a shotty job. The contract had indicated that they should leave the walls in ready-to-paint condition - of course, that was not the case.

So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were spent fixing the hallway. With Christmas music in the background, we worked on fixing the hallway. I have realized that I often paint while listening to Christmas music. Even though it is still early in the season, it created the perfect mood for renovation.

Don't judge my messy laundry closet.

Due to the coldness of the garage, I setup painting the trim and baseboard in the dining room and in the hallway on saw horses. It worked out pretty well.

By Saturday, we have a finished hallway. Pretty.

Don't look too closely at the mitered corners.

And here is the wall that started it all - all fixed up.

The only thing we had to buy was rollers. Each roller costs $4.00. A hefty change. Everything else we had, including the paint for the wall. For the wall above - we had to strain the paint because there were a lot of gunk in it - so I took my mother-in-law's stockings and cut the leg off and used it to strain the paint through. For the other walls - we used the same color as the living room, because we still had a can of it - Sherwin Williams Greek Villa SW 7551. I love this white color. It is a beautiful white. Not too white and not too beige. I think it's the perfect white.

Our next project will be a big one. Hopefully hubby will start on that really soon. It's more involve and scarier.

Vanamos!

Quilt & Bitch.

Renovation :: Guest Bathroom v.3

October 19 2015,

When we moved in, in 2010, the guest bathroom looked like this. The house was built in the late 1950's. Most of our neighbor's bathroom who have not renovated their bathroom, their bathroom still has the retro look.

So when we moved in, we had the bathroom renovated. No pictures came from this renovation, because it looked horrible.

The contractors who did it, did such a bad job that after we fired them, we didn't trust their work and had to redo it. So fast forward to May 2015. We had friends over for a graduation and they were using the sink. All of a sudden, the pipe for the sink starts leaking.

It was a good time to demo everything anyway, so that's what we do. Hubby had wanted to keep the existing floors - but I convinced him to take everything out because we did not know the quality of the work. It turned out that the plumber did not glue one of the pipe, which led to the leaking. It leaked all the way to the basement bathroom - but luckily that was already gutted and down to the bare studs.

The culprit

Hubby + I (mainly hubby) did most of the renovation and supervision. We hired a plasterer, a tiler, and a plumber. This is the plumber that couldn't rough our original Kohler Escale sink (even after we gave numerous warnings that the first plumber had not done it right either).

So after at least 6 trips to the tile store, and a minimum of 30 trips to the local box store (no exaggeration), we have a finish bathroom.

The concept of the bathroom was based on the bathtub itself. The bathtub is the Kohler Expanse Curve tub. I like the curve look and carried it throughout the bathroom. The light has a light curve, the shower curtain rod has a curve, and the vanity handles. It is the attention to detail.

The floor tile is a dark bluish gray with light gray lines. I went for a darker tile color so the floor will hide the dirt well. The bathtub tile on the left and right is ceramic white matte and in the middle is glass. I've realized that glass tile was expensive, but I liked the look of it, so we minimized the cost by doing the ceramic white matte. On the sink wall, we tied in the area with the white glass tile.

Originally, we had wanted to tile the walls where the toilet nook was, with ceramic gray matte tiles. Unfortunately it was back ordered and would not be available for another month. We ended up painting it with Sherwin Williams "Lazy Gray". The "Lazy Gray" was not too dark and not too light.

The vanity piece came from Home Depot. We had wanted to use another vanity and something smaller, but they had a blow out sale, we couldn't resist not buying it. It does feel a little bit cramp because of that 48" big vanity. But it does provide a lot of space.

The blinds came from Levelor. We decided to use top down bottom up so that we can always have it half open to bring light into the room without compromising a compromising situation (does that make sense?).

After everything is said and done, I'm happy with the bathroom.

Renovating a bathroom is similar to making a quilt. Carefully choosing every single piece that goes into the room to make sure it is in unison.

What I learned from this was to take pictures. Take pictures of everything during the process. Every little corner, every little thing. From the beginning while we were demoing, and when the plumbing was redone, and when the plasterer was in, I took pictures. This helped hubby a few times, because when the tiler had already tiled the wall with the shower bar and the shower diverter, he had to reference back what was behind the tiled wall. This way when there was a question about something, all I had to do was show them the pictures.

One down, two to go.

Quilt & Bitch

Rejected!

December 12 2014,

I got an email yesterday from QuiltCon saying something along the lines that my two quilts I submitted were REJECTED. No really, I'm not at all annoyed or pissed or upset. I wasted spent $60.00 to enter the quilt ($25.00 for membership + $35.00 for quilt entry). Carry on, carry on.

Another rejection came from hubby. We had been working on tiling the fireplace. Measuring, scoring and cutting the tiles. Ever since this fireplace project started, hubby kept on saying something along the lines of, "When are you going to do the fireplace?" This question and / or sometimes statement has been going on for months.

I was hesitant to take on this project so I kept on saying that I wasn't going to do it. And usually what happens is that we'll tackle it together.

Yesterday I knew we were going to tile it. So I asked him, "When are you going to do the fireplace?" He blew up. I then said, "It was a joke. You keep on asking me when I'M going to do the fireplace this whole time, and now when I ask you the same question, YOU can't take it?" So that was that.

He did the fireplace with none of my help. Now every time I look at this freakin' fireplace, it will give me a sewer sour taste. Whatever. For right now, we're not on talking terms.

We'll see how the grouting goes today.

Before tiling

After tiling

 Quilt & Bitch

I Went to Heaven...

December 4 2014,

Last month we went to Niche Modern semi annual glass blown lighting sale in Beacon, NY (near Fish Kill). We took a one day trip, three hours south and three hours back.

When hubby first showed me the pendants that they made, my jaw fell. My jaw fell further when I saw the price list.

They are stunning, elegant, and beautiful.

I investigated and saw that they had a semi annual sale (this was in July). So I patiently waited from July till November. It was a very long wait.

We made it a trip to go to NY to save some dough. The sale happened on the second weekend of November and was a factory sale - which meant seconds and showroom clearance. They were either 50% off or 80%.

At the end of the trip, we came back with 5 glass blown pendants - even though we only needed two or three depending on the configuration.

The pieces are absolutely stunning. They are made in Beacon, NY - and the owner Jeremy Pyles was also there.

We're waiting for a canopy for the dining room so that we can hang these beautiful pendant. We have spares just in case we break one or two of them. We did not buy the canopy from Niche Modern, due to the cost, but found something comparable.

Quilt & Bitch